The Deceivingest Fellow: David T. Hines and the Crisis of Southern Honor

Lawrence T. McDonnell Iowa State University

Villain, fraud, hypocrite, imposter, scoundrel: just about everyone in antebellum

America knew Dave, or thought they did.1 Almost no one saw him coming. Some few suffered for that error in a financial sense. Many more railed against his casual misappropriation of friendship, propinquity, identity, honor. Nearly all men and women on the eve of the Civil War had learned to scan any social situation, reading action as melodrama and penetrating to the heart of falsehood.2 Or getting flummoxed and fleeced and starting over again, a little wiser, perhaps.

Yet historians have read the record with shocking carelessness, letting the good doctor slip away clean—not a trace or mention of David Theodosius Hines in all his various monkeyshines shows up anywhere in the scholarly literature.3 From “notorious” to nothing is quite a come-down, especially for a fellow who (maybe) wrote not one, but two captivating autobiographies.4

Dave’s contemporaries we can excuse: they were honestly hoodwinked. But how academics have managed to miss every clue to the existence of a man who threw the cultural identity of the nation into both pleasant and pestiferous confusion over the course of decades is

1 This essay is derived from a larger project in progress, Chasing Dave: the Unbelievable World of an American Scoundrel. For advice and criticism, I am indebted to Kathleen Hilliard, Vernon Burton, John Mayfield, and the late Bertram Wyatt-Brown. Please do not quote, cite or circulate this essay without permission.

2 The classic study is Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830-1870 (New Haven, 1982). See also Nina Auerbach, Private Theatricals: The Lives of the Victorians (Cambridge, 1990); Lynn M. Voskuil, Acting Naturally: Victorian Theatricality and Authenticity (Charlottesville, 2004).

3 The only book which mentions Hines is a tourist-oriented paperback, which gets his story and much else quite wrong. Mark R. Jones, Wicked Charleston: The Dark Side of the Holy City (Charleston, 2005), 69.

4 Hines was a famous fellow throughout the nation, “well-known” in the South Carolina lowcountry by 1831, and referred to as “notorious” in nearly every newspaper account of his antics by decade’s end. See, e.g., (Columbia, S. C.) Southern Times and State Gazette, May 28, 1831; (Philadelphia) Pennsylvania Inquirer and Daily Courier, November 23, 1839. 1 another story. The life and career of David T. Hines tells much about the contradictions of honor and identity at the heart of southern society, and perhaps as much about the way we write history now.5

Myself, I guess I met Dave twice—or heard of him, at least--before I wondered if we had crossed paths at all. That was a common reaction before the Civil War, too. Three decades ago, to no direct purpose, I copied down the record of David T. Hines’ 1831 bankruptcy petition, stored in a file box in the South Carolina Department of Archives and History, along with dozens of other pleas of like kind.6 It was nothing special: Hines was a landless fellow too deep in debt in a rural Charleston neighborhood appropriately called Scuffletown. By rights, he should have sunk into personal oblivion in the swamp of note cards I was amassing. So many others did.

Somehow or other, though, that last-century long-hand form of research inscribed in my brain a dim memory, so that when—years later—the arrest of “Dr. Hines” for “Negro stealing” in

Louisiana in 1840 showed up on a microfilm newspaper reel far from my initial point of contact, something pre-consciously clicked with me.7 Were these two guys one? That was the way history used to be done. I remember when.

From there, slow but sure, my scholar-as-detective quest turned up treasure: scattered

5 In her brilliant study of the murder of the prostitute Helen Jewett, for example, Patricia Cohen wonders about the identity of her victim’s lover-doctor, who was quite probably Hines. Although she explores the case with extreme care, she overlooks evidence linking Jewett to the -born counterfeiter Monroe Edwards, who was Hines’ sometime confederate. The consequence is that she misses Hines’ account of Jewett’s three-month excursion to Charleston, just before her death in 1836. Patricia Cline Cohen, The Murder of Helen Jewett (New York, 1998), esp. 105-108; Authentic Biography of the Late Helen Jewett, A Girl of the Town, who was Murdered on the 10th of April, 1836: Together with a Full and Accurate Statement of the Circumstances Connected with that Event, by a Gentleman Fully Acquainted with her History (New York, 1836); H. R. Howard and George Wilkes, The Lives of Helen Jewett, and Richard P. Robinson (New York, 1849); Life and Adventures of the Accomplished Forger and Swindler, Colonel Monroe Edwards (New York, 1848); Life and Adventures of Dr. David T. Hines. A Narrative of Thrilling Interest and Most Stirring Scenes of his Eventful Life (Charleston, 1852).

6 Petition of David T. Hines, October 16, 1833, Petitions and Schedules of Insolvent Debtors, Records of the Court of Common Pleas, Charleston County, South Carolina Department of Archives and History. See also (Columbia, S. C.) Columbia Telescope, May 27, 1831.

7 (Augusta, Ga.) Augusta Chronicle, June 12, 1840. 2 newspaper notes and encounters in manuscript collections at first—pure needle-in-haystack stuff—then full-blown memoirs hiding in plain sight, widely advertised in 1840 and 1852, and still widely available—if anyone cared to look. How, at a time when southern cultural and intellectual history was enjoying a remarkable resurgence, had I—we--missed those astonishing texts for so long?8 Working through thousands of manuscript collections in scores of libraries across dozens of years while pursuing rather larger matters than an increasingly unordinary con man, I kept bumping into Dave (I thought) by chance. A robbery, a flight, prison again! Surely there were many more instances where he pulled down his hat and passed me by, unnoticed.

“It is a pity that Dave is such a rascal,” Charleston’s Peter Porcher declared in 1839, for he seemed altogether honorable, “generous and disinterested.”9 The trouble was, his every word and gesture was a sham, the all-too-realistic performance of “the deceivingest fellow you ever did see.”10 Dressed to the nines, graced with faultless manners, portraying an attractively cool, manly demeanor on the day they met at a Tennessee mountain resort, Hines was worlds away from his humble origins as an overseer’s son on Porcher’s uncle’s plantation.11 No wonder he fooled so many for so much for so long, striding across the years as both scoundrel and hero— quite a new kind of trickster—and caused such confusion and sly admiration on the eve of disunion.

His cleverness, my stupidity, and the vast mountains of manuscripts, newspapers, and public records which might possibly contain a clue to Hines’s perambulations conspired to

8Imagine, for example, how a fellow like Dave might complicate and enliven a work such as Michael O’Brien, Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810-1860, 2 vols. (Chapel Hill, 2004).

9 Peter C. Porcher to Elizabeth S. Porcher, April 29, 1839, Peter Cordes Porcher Papers, South Carolina Historical Society, Charleston, S. C. [hereinafter cited as SCHS].

10 Peter C. Porcher to Elizabeth S. Porcher, May 12, 1839, Peter Cordes Porcher Papers, SCHS.

11 [Richard Hrabowski, comp.], Directory for the District of Charleston Comprising the Places of Residence and Occupation of the White Inhabitants of the Following Parishes…. (Charleston, 1809). 3 ensure that I’d never know much about the man or his meaning—or could ever know that I knew—by proceeding as I had.12 But then, about five years back, digitization hit in a big way, and the roof fell in for old Dave.13 Now it is abundantly clear how much trouble one shameless fellow made for a society rooted in an ethos of honor.

We can see Dave better now, a man of “small stature” and “pale complexion,” riding “a fine bay mare of great fleetness” steadily away from his home in St. Stephen’s Parish, his “short brown coat” and “drab pantaloons” flapping in the breeze.14 Others constructed this scene as a

“well-known” rogue’s flight from justice; Dave considered it a decisive moment in a manly, heroic quest to realize personal ambition and win the honor “evil forces” had long denied him.15

Or so he said. Carolinians in 1831 thought he was headed to Georgia or Mississippi—still mostly wild west and up for grabs—but soon he sailed straight up north, trading his “leather cap” for a beaver hat. The game was on.16

From 1831 to 1864, David Hines travelled all over the eastern United States, from

Galveston, Mobile, and to St. Louis, , and Saratoga Springs, pulsing

12 Cf., the variant approaches to this problem of Jonathan Spence, The Death of Woman Wang (New York, 1978); Alain Corbin, The Life of an Unknown: The Rediscovered World of a Clog Maker in Nineteenth-Century France (New York, 2001); Scott R. Nelson, Steel Drivin’ Man: The Untold Story of an American Legend (New York, 2006).

13 Websites such as Ancestry, Genealogybank, Fold3, Gale’s American Nineteenth-Century Newspapers and others are transforming the way scholars write history “from the bottom up.” The potential scholarly misuse of these sites is enormous—just a few clicks provides a passable veneer of research which can be slapped upon a boilerplate of secondary sources and, voila, we have scholarly innovation. And how to footnote it all has not nearly been thought out yet. But for prosopographers, anthropological historians, and microhistorians chasing little-known men and women across a vast terrain of time and space with finite resources of time, money, and energy, these sites are a godsend. Cf., Lawrence Stone, “Prosopography,” Daedalus, 100 (1971): 46-79; Greg Dening, “A Poetics for Histories: Transformations that Present the Past,” in Clio in Oceania: Toward a Historical Anthropology, ed. Aletta Biersack (Washington, 1991): 347-380; Giovanni Levi, “On Microhistory,” in New Perspectives on Historical Writing, ed. Peter Burke (University Park, Penn., 1992): 93-113; Richard D. Brown, “Microhistory and the Post-Modern Challenge,” Journal of the Early Republic, 23 (2003): 1-20.

14 (Columbia, S. C.) Southern Times and State Gazette, May 18, 1831.

15 (Philadelphia) National Gazette, May 28, 1831; Life and Adventures of Dr. David T. Hines, 28-31.

16 Charleston City Gazette, May 18, 1831. 4 steadily between Charleston and New York—and a variety of jails, prisons, and penitentiaries in between. He looked like a southern gentleman, “fine looking, …well set, middle height, of good address,” dandified but never flash.17 He acted as any planter, editor, or politician plausibly would. He displayed credentials of merit, wealth, and standing. He portrayed the height of politesse—splendid manners, impeccable dress, a frank, independent manner which personified grace. Others called him the “shade of Beau Brummel.”18 He called himself many names—

Colonel Allston, Lieutenant Pringle, Major Middleton, Doctor Haynes, Professor Porcher,

Reverend Baker, and dozens more, even impersonating James Hamilton, former governor of

South Carolina, the “Bayard of the South.”19 But David T. Hines was no Dandy Jim Hamilton.

Far from the acme of southern honor, he spent nearly forty years making a mockery of that ethos, causing crisis wherever he went.

Long before he fled St. Stephen’s, Dave had made himself infamous locally, forging checks, swindling cash, running wild in bordellos and “gambling hells,” fighting sheriffs and drawing down on his social superiors.20 After 1831, he truly found his stride, grifting and counterfeiting, stealing slaves, horses, and carriages, conning men and women, high and low out

17 “Incidents in the Life of David Hines,” Charleston Courier, June 16, 1840. Dandyism implied a searching precision of personal style, not overly elaborate costume. A man became conspicuous and admired here exactly because his dress was perfectly proper. Ellen Moer, The Dandy: Brummel to Beerbohm (London, 1960). By the end of the antebellum era, though, a different view was emerging. “A dandy is a chap who would be a lady if he could,” opined one newspaper, “but as he can’t, does all he can to show the world he is not a man.” Charleston Daily Courier, May 22, 1858.

18 (Natchez, Miss.) Natchez Courier, July 23, 1840. Cf., Samuel Tenenbaum, The Incredible Beau Brummell (New York, 1967); Ian Kelly, Beau Brummell: The Ultimate Man of Style (New York, 2006).

19 [David T. Hines?] The Life, Adventures, and Opinions of David Theo. Hines: of South Carolina; Master of Arts, and Sometimes, Doctor of Medicine... in a Series of Letters to his Friends (New York, 1840). That Hines passed himself off as “a fop, a decided fop,” made it all the easier to impersonate the original “Jim Dandy.” New York Spectator, August 3, 1840. But there may be more to this still. At various points in his career, while in police custody, newspaper reports mocked Hines for a distinctive speech defect. (Philadelphia) North American and Daily Advertiser, October 23, 1840. Was this an attempt to portray Hines, the ultimate outlier, as homosexual?

20 Unless otherwise noted, this sketch is drawn from Life and Adventures of Dr. David T. Hines. 5 of just about anything which might be turned to cash. He masqueraded in the company of great and powerful men, fooling Crittenden and Clay, James Gordon Bennett of New York, even

Andrew Jackson himself.21 He made common cause with a host of rogues and ne’er-do-wells from Monroe Edwards to Helen Jewett.22 He haunted theatres, barrooms, and whorehouses, peddling drugs, extorting and swindling fools, performing abortions. He married and quit a string of women--non-sequentially, alas--seduced a dozen more, assaulted at least one, and may have been a serial rapist. By the time things came crashing down in 1839—a stolen slave, a recklessly bold denial of fault, a guilty verdict—Dave had become as famous as P. T. Barnum.23

But none of Barnum’s humbugs earned him fourteen years in a Baton Rouge penitentiary. For

Dr. Hines, celebrity carried a steep pricetag.

Yet, at just this moment, Dave—or someone—determined to make his plight pay.24

Rather than repenting his sins, he published them in book-length form, dragging all manner of well-known men into his “life of action, enterprise, and ingenuity,” as fit subjects for mockery and mirth. True, there was “scarcely any portion of the country which he ha[d] not visited… uniformly swindl[ing] every man who… put it in his power to do so.”25 But whose fault was that?

21 “Incidents in the Life of David Hines,” Charleston Courier, June 16, 1840.

22 Melville scholars looking to discover the identity of the “Confidence Man” have focused upon Edwards, but contemporaries noted that Edwards “has been likened to Dr. Hines,” a far more famous, wide-ranging, and (shall we say) well-rounded scoundrel. That James Gordon Bennett drew the contrast so, and not the other way round, explodes the Edwards-as-“Confidence-Man” argument, I’d say. More than this, Edwards was ten years dead by the time Melville’s book appeared, and Hines was still going strong. Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (New York, 1857); New York Herald, November 6, 1841. Cf., William B. Dillingham, Melville’s Short Fiction, 1853-1856 (Athens, 2008), 51-52; Andrew Delbanco, Melville: His World and Work (New York, 2005).

23 Abolitionists delighted to note that the testimony of free black witnesses had secured his conviction. (New York) The Emancipator, December 3, 1840.

24 Quite possibly, Hines was impelled by the initially negative press coverage of his arrest and trial. See especially “Incidents in the Life of David Hines,” Charleston Courier, June 16, 1840; (Hartford, Conn.) New England Weekly Review, June 20, 1840.

25 (Camden, S. C.) Camden Journal, June 20, 1840. 6

Dr. Hines was merely one of those “chevaliers d’industrie”—an entrepreneur—“whose researches and appropriations extend to all communities and to every variety of movables.” Call him a villain, and what could one make of that whole vast tribe that preached the gospel of merchant capital, buying cheap, selling dear, and growing fat upon the profits? Until recently, the categories of visionary, entrepreneur, financier, trader, shyster, and fraud seemed in some measure analytically distinct, yet such divisions were not at all so clear in the antebellum era.

Nor was it yet obvious just which parts of the emerging capitalist economy should be considered legitimate and which consigned underground. This was a well-fertilized terrain of political struggle historians are only beginning to explore, and David Hines, by his own lights, just one mushroom among thousands, merely seeking sun and sustenance.26

If, as a “Professor of Appropriation,” his experiments had momentarily failed, that hardly meant that he had learnt—or should have learned--any lesson, except that of Wordsworth’s poetry:

--The good old rule Sufficeth me—the simple plan, That they should take, who have the power, And they should keep, who can.27

That ancient ethos had suited the “dauntless heart” of Rob Roy and Robin Hood both; it might yet serve a thief as “wise and brave” as Dave, too—and must prove profitable in the long run.28

It was hard to match Hines for cheek, for sure. As much as the Doctor had once been reviled and feared, the incarcerated Dave was soon “celebrated” as “a smart, active fellow,” “a

26 Here, let me note proudly the impending publication of a book which examines this problem in extenso: Kathleen M. Hilliard, Masters, Slaves, and Exchange: Power’s Purchase in the Old South (New York, 2013). For congruent elaborations of this problem in a different time and place, see especially Sudhir A. Venkatesh, Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor (Cambridge, 2009); Katherine Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity (New York, 2012).

27 This was, in effect, the tag line selling his memoir. Charleston Courier, July 30, 1840.

28 Cf., William Wordsworth, Memorials of a Tour of Scotland (London, 1803). 7 second Paul Clifford,” the chivalrous fictional highwayman who operated amously on “a dark and stormy night.”29 Sorting out which of the tall tales in his book were true and which simply doubled down on his hoaxing became a kind of parlor game. As with other famous fakeries of the age—Sam Slick’s Yankee clocks, Johann Maelzel’s Automaton Chess Player, Barnum’s Fiji

Mermaid, the crooked cons, trouser-wearing women, and effeminate “foo-foos” who confronted

Mose the Bowery B’hoy—readers came to delight in the battle of wits between Dave and his various opponents, spying out the crucial clues to identity his victims missed, hanging on the suspense of true character so nearly, nakedly revealed.30 It was an age of melodrama, when success in daily life depended, potentially at every moment, on an instant, accurate reading of and precisely modulated response to a host of characters, real and pretended, in a world of personages and strangers, rising and falling, coming and going as never before in American lived experience.31 Emerson spoke of skating expertly on surfaces, but Melville knew that life was more like bobbing alone in shark-filled seas, clinging desperately, gladly, to another man’s coffin.

No wonder men inwardly cheered a free swimmer like Dave, and delighted when he bit down

29 (Camden, S. C.) Camden Journal, June 20, 1840; (Philadelphia) Pennsylvania Inquirer and Daily Courier, June 22, 1840; “Dr. Hines,” Niles’ National Register, 58 (1840): 263. Cf., Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Paul Clifford, 3 vols. (London, 1830).

30 Thomas C. Haliburton, The Clockmaker; or, the Sayings and Doings of Samuel Slick of Slickville (Philadelphia, 1840); Tom Standage, The Turk: the Life and Times of the Famous Eighteenth-Century Chess-Playing Machine (New York, 2002); Gerald M. Leavitt, The Turk, Chess Automaton (Jefferson, NC, 2006); Kenneth S. Greenberg, “The Nose, the Lie, and the Duel in the Antebellum South,” American Historical Review, 95 (1990): 57-74; Benjamin A. Baker, A Glance at New York (New York, 1857); Playbills, Charleston, S. C., Theatre, March 15, 1858, Chatham Theatre, New York, April 25, 1848, Olympic Theatre, New York, April 29, 1848, Bowery Theatre, New York, June 17, 1853, Harvard Theatre Collection, Pusey Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.

31 On the vexed problem of geographic and social mobility, begin with Stephan Thernstrom and Peter Knights, “Men in Motion: Some Data and Speculations about Urban Population Mobility in Nineteenth-Century America,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 1 (1970): 7-35, which frames the problem well. Compare that with the brilliant political analysis of Bryan D. Palmer, “Social Formation and Class Formation in North America, 1800- 1900,” in Proletarianization and Family History, ed. David Levine (New York, 1984), 229-309. On the vast literature concerning melodrama in politics and daily life, see Robertson Davies, The Mirror of Nature (Toronto, 1983); Frank Rahill, The World of Melodrama (University Park, Penn., 1986); Bruce McConachie, Melodramatic Formations: American Theatre and Society, 1820-1870 (Iowa City, 1992), and especially Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York, 1982). 8 hard. His was a freedom, a craft, an acuity of vision they hungered for, the stuff that made men famous and rich.32

Soon second-string Daves began popping up in jails around the South, petty thieves and incompetent con men who aspired to the life, the fame, even the name of Doctor Hines itself.

That the real Dave tried to break jail twice after sentencing only increased local uncertainty about imposters who washed up in the hands of the law: was this fellow or that such a failed performance of the celebrated scoundrel, or was it all quite the reverse?33 In a moment of financial, technological, communications, and detective revolution, when telegraphs, daguerreotypes, rotary-press printed newspapers, railroad travel, prices-current sheets, and professional police forces were flooding the South, men asked whether Dave—super-villain or superhero—had outrun them all.34 As years past and men saw Dave in prison, the question changed: could time and reflection reform the rogue? “There is a ‘balm in Gilead’,” optimists preached. “Amen!” shouted a host of doctors, lawyers, colonels, preachers, and more, all from a single cell.35

In 1852, Louisiana’s governor pardoned Hines on the basis of good behavior.36 Dave had

32 Cf., Paul Johnson, Sam Patch, the Famous Jumper (New York, 2003).

33 (New York) Morning Herald, August 17, 1840; (Edgefield, S. C.) Edgefield Advertiser, October 8, 1840; Mississippi Free Trader and Natchez Daily Gazette, January 19, 1841; New York Spectator, February 3, 1841; (Charlestown) Virginia Free Press, February 4, 1841; (Greenville, S. C.) Greenville Mountaineer, August 12, 1842. Stealing from Agatha Christie’s book and Billy Wilder’s film, Witness for the Prosecution (1957), the clever 1995 film, The Usual Suspects, posed the same problem as a question: “Who is Keyser Söze?” The answer was, just the last person you might suppose—the apparent antithesis of a criminal mastermind. Americans so feared Dave that they wondered if he had not doubled back in this way.

34 See especially Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath Got Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 (New York, 2007).

35 (New Orleans) Times-Picayune, September 1, 1840; (Columbia) South Carolina Temperance Advocate, September 3, 1840. It seems as though Carolinians especially took comfort in the knowledge that Dave was actually, finally behind bars. (Greenville, S. C.) Greenville Mountaineer, October 23, 1840.

36 New York Daily Tribune, February 25, 1852. 9 always known how to behave, and how to wait. What difference did twelve years of boot- making and bad meals make? By summer, a book-length, name-naming, tell-all memoir had landed in bookstores across the country. He might have stopped there and gone on the stump like any number of famous men from Charles Dickens to Chang and Eng Bunker, lecturing and performing for big cash.37 Instead, just as quickly, Doctor Hines was on the run once more. In

August he broke jail in Georgia, where he had been lodged for unspecified crimes.38 Word said they caught him in Macon, quite “behind the age” for a man of his sagacity.39 The 1850s went like that for the “rare chap”—his fame preceded him, the capture was increasingly easy, and perhaps he enjoyed the attention, too.40 Or maybe someone else did: one Baltimore report from

1852 described a typical mix-up: the Hines in Savannah jail was really Jesse Quantrill; the

Quantrill in Kentucky penitentiary was really Dr. B. J. Hayne; Dave, one way or another, was out roaming.41 Eventually, right or wrong, catching up the Colonel, or Doctor, or Reverend, came to seem like shooting fish in a barrel. There were just a whole lot of fish, big and little, fast and loose, as Melville would have said.42

Increasingly, it was hard not to hit something that squeaked out the name Doctor Hines.

By 1853, President Pierce had joined in the sport, pardoning Dave for stealing from the federal

37 At one point, mid-decade, the “well-known” Dr. Hines did offer “a lecture on Penitentiaries, their discipline, their abuse of the labor system and their cruelties” in New Orleans. But this seems to have been a one-off affair. (Augusta, Ga.) Daily Chronicle & Sentinel, January 11, 1855. Three months later, he was arrested at Louisville for impersonating “Col. Hamilton.” (Bangor, Me.) Bangor Daily Whig and Courier, April 19, 1855.

38 (Savannah) Daily Morning News, August 18, 1852.

39 (Richmond) Daily Dispatch, August 23, 1852; (Savannah) Daily Morning News, August 18, 1852.

40 (Edgefield, S. C.) Edgefield Advertiser, November 7, 1855 (quote); (Columbia) Daily South Carolinian, May 1, 1855.

41 Baltimore Sun, August 27, 1852. By 1859, the use of daguerreotypes to identify criminals had further tipped the scales against Hines in larger cities like New Orleans. Charleston Mercury, January 28, 1859.

42 Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; Or, The Whale (New York 1851), chap. 89.

10 mails.43 In many communities he was arrested on sight, pushed onto a train or carriage, and sent on his way.44 So long as he got a decent dinner and a measure of deference, it appeared, Dave no longer seemed to mind. He was “polite and gentlemanly” as ever, ingratiating in “ten thousand” charming ways, famous for his “rascalities” from Maine to San Francisco.45 And so respectable society achieved a rough, negotiated stalemate with the South’s most shameless citizen.

Honorable men, though, had a tougher time of it. Frederick A. Porcher, professor of political economy at the College of Charleston, seethed when he thought of Hines.46 The rotter had been a rider thrown at the Pineville races in his youth, he recalled, then given a job as cow- minder from plain sympathy. A student at William and Mary, studying under Thomas R. Dew??

Porcher would not even countenance the claim.47 Hines’ career was “proof of the extreme gullibility of the American people,” nothing more. Though he assumed the identity of “the best names in the State” of South Carolina, Porcher railed, Dave lacked “the manners, the address, or even the external appearance of a gentleman.” Indeed, his only qualification as a proper rogue, the professor thought, was “matchless effrontery.”48

But that was manifestly untrue. Hines was abundantly qualified, skilled, and successful—to a point. Hardly any criminal in antebellum America could match his fame, his

43 Daily Cleveland Herald, July 16, 1853.

44 (Sumterville, S. C.) Sumterville Banner, September 7, 1853; (Savannah) Daily Morning News, October 28, 1853; Nashville Union and American, February 18, 1859.

45 (Montgomery, Ala.) Daily Confederation, February 15, 1859; (San Francisco) Daily Evening Bulletin, March 18, 1859.

46 Uncertainty lingers as to whether Fred’s middle name was Augustus or Adolphus, appropriately complicating his own identity.

47 Interestingly, a George E. Hines did attend the college in 1821—about the time Dave claimed to have studied there. Catalogue of the College of William and Mary, in Virginia, from its Foundation to the Present Time (n. p., 1859), 64.

48 [Frederick A. Porcher], “Historical and Social Sketch of Craven County,” Southern Quarterly Review, 25 (1854): 421. 11 range, or his run. His memoirs describe in detail the process by which Dave transformed himself—like Clark Kent—into Doctor Hines, a process requiring cool brains, keen vision, ready wit, and nerves of steel. Like the best of actors, he had to inhabit the character he portrayed—

“any number of abused names and titles,” and yet stand apart from it, examining it critically and recalibrating his performance at every moment.49 An arduous and nearly impossible task that sounds, yet that was just what the code of honor required of every man within its circle at every moment in the Old South.50 Surely that was what so vexed Professor Porcher: Dave was so much better at perceiving and portraying honor than most anyone else, splendidly, shamelessly so. That was the true source of all the trouble he caused.

By his own lights, Hines presented himself as a true gentleman, standing for “gallant chivalry” and “honorable distinction” against “that class of persons who dislike the excellence of others because they never can attain it themselves.”51 And however odd it must have seemed to see Hines--of all men--portraying the social acme of the southern elite, we should not doubt his sincerity. To an earlier age, honor had meant privilege, leisure, and license too, not moral uplift.52 That paternalism conferred responsibilities on the gentry, as well as customary rights, had been easily forgotten. Before 1820, none had imagined portraying slavery as a positive good or planter society as the acme of conservative civilization.53 That chattel bondage allowed

49 Charleston Daily Courier, June 14, 1859.

50 Julian Pitt-Rivers, “Honor,” in International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, ed. David L. Sills (New York, 1968), 6: 503-511.

51 Life and Adventures of Dr. David T. Hines, 9, 21.

52 Richard J. Calhoun, ed., Witness to Sorrow: the Antebellum Autobiography of William J. Grayson (Columbia, 1990), 59-64; Entry of November 28, 1832, Samuel Cram Jackson Diary, South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina [hereinafter cited as SCL]; Charles Fraser to Hugh S. Legare, April 4, 1832, Charles Fraser Papers, SCL. Any examination of southern honor begins, of course, with the work of Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (New York, 1982).

53 Larry E. Tise, Proslavery: A History of the Defense of Slavery in America, 1701-1840 (Athens, 1987), 97-123; 12 masters to get rich quick and wield political power to their liking had been ethic enough.

Certainly that attitude continued to thrive in the salons of many mansions in Charleston or New

Orleans, even after mid-century. But, by 1850, honor’s culture was besieged in the South--and most of the Western world--and the chivalry’s choices had come down to self-reform or self- destruction.54 Doctor Hines, alas, summed up perfectly why the drive for social transformation was bound to fail.

The trouble was, though honor embraced all men, it reserved its richest prizes for the upper ranks, barring entrance to all but a handful pushing up from below. That was its political purpose. For men of superior ambition but lesser means, the only alternative was to embrace a potentially parallel status system. On the eve of Lincoln’s election, honor’s position as the dominant measure of personal attainment across much of the South was threatened by the market-driven ethos of respectability.55

The culture of respectability took root first among the urban middle class of England and the United States in the early Victorian period as a buttress against hedonistic excesses pinching

Christine Dierksheide and Peter S. Onuf, “Slaveholding Nation, Slaveholding Civilization,” in In the Cause of Liberty: How the Civil War Redefined American Ideals, ed. William J. Cooper, Jr., and John M. McCardell (Baton Rouge, 2009), 9-24; Lacy K. Ford, Deliver Us From Evil: The Slavery Question in the Old South (New York, 2009).

54 Honor faced a host of challenges from the mid-eighteenth century onward. On the conflict of honor and virtue, for example, see Guy Chaussinand-Nogaret, The French Nobility in the Eighteenth Century: From Feudalism to Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1985). So far, southern historians have mostly brushed aside the political and cultural contradictions republican virtue posed for honor’s code.

55 The discussion here pits honor against respectability—for they were deadly foes—yet some southerners, unsurprisingly, tried to bridge the gap between these ideals. See., e. g., William G. Simms, Life of Chevalier Bayard: “The Good Knight,” “Sans peur et sans reproche” (New York, 1847); idem, Self-Development. An Oration Delivered before the Literary Societies of Oglethorpe University, Georgia, November 10, 1847 (Milledgeville, 1847). This point is argued in slightly different form in Bertram Wyatt-Brown, “Modernizing Southern Slavery: the Proslavery Argument Reinterpreted,” in Region, Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward, ed. J. Morgan Kousser and James M. McPherson (New York, 1992), 27-50; Eugene D. Genovese, The Slaveholders’ Dilemma: Freedom and Progress in Southern Conservative Thought, 1820-1860 (Columbia, 1992). 13 bourgeois society from above and below.56 Like honor, respectability structured reputation in terms of outward appearance and behavior, not inward consciousness: the feelings of the heart were too easily misapprehended or mimicked by those seeking to gull the unwary. Among men of honor, private emotions and intentions were simply irrelevant in calculating social standing.

Likewise, for devotees of respectability, purity of heart was a goal to be prayed and striven for, but only the outward evidence of praying and striving could be calculated with any sort of assurance. Under honor’s regime, a man was the sum of his social relations, no more or less.

For advocates of respectability, though, this led inevitably to a hypocritical “flunkeyism.”

Society here became a system of “Toadyism organized—base Man-and-Mammon worship, instituted by command of law.”57 Respectable folk, rather, scrutinized outward demeanor to glimpse signs of the inner man. In this view, men and women were stubbornly individual, defined by self-actuated behavior and discrete temperaments. Identities were irremediably

56 Respectability has suffered all sorts of scholarly indignities, ahistorical usage and imprecise definition topping the list. Typical is Jack D. Douglas, ed., Deviance and Respectability: the Social Construction of Moral Meanings (New York, 1970). Otherwise excellent studies which flounder in dealing with the concept include Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor, esp. 99, 124 (although compare the promising discussion on page 23); L. Diane Barnes, “Fraternity and Masculine Identity: the Search for Respectability among White and Black Artisans in Petersburg, Virginia,” in Southern Manhood: Perspectives on Masculinity in the Old South, ed. Craig T. Friend and Lorri Glover (Athens, 2004), 71-91; Lorri Glover, Southern Sons: Becoming Men in the New Nation (Baltimore, 2007), 89-91, 104-111. Among the most useful treatments of the concept, see Amy K. R. Minton, “A Culture of Respectability: Southerners and Social Relations in Richmond, Virginia, 1820-1865” (Ph. D. diss.: University of Virginia, 2006); Harold J. Perkin, The Origins of Modern English Society, 1780-1880 (London, 1969), 218-290; Paul O’Leary, “Networking Respectability: Class, Gender, and Ethnicity among the Irish in South Wales, 1845-1914,” Immigrants and Minorities, 23 (2005): 255-275; John Benson, “Drink, Death, and Bankruptcy: Retailing and Respectability in Late Victorian and Edwardian England,” Midland History, 32 (2007): 128-140. Recent literature on the growth of a southern middle class in the antebellum era has mostly failed to consider respectability as a social ethos challenging the world of honor. See, e. g., Jonathan D. Wells, The Origins of the Southern Middle Class, 1800-1861 (Chapel Hill, 2004); idem, “The Southern Middle Class,” Journal of Southern History, 75 (2009): 651-662; Frank Towers, The Urban South and the Coming of the Civil War (Charlottesville, 2004); Frank J. Byrne, Becoming Bourgeois: Merchant Culture in the South, 1820-1865 (Lexington, 2006); Scott P. Marler, “Stuck in the Middle (Class) with You,” Historical Methods, 39 (2006): 154-158; Jennifer R. Green, Military Education and the Emerging Middle Class in the Old South (New York, 2008).

57 William M. Thackeray, The Book of Snobs (New York, 1852), 15.

14 singular.58

Under each system, hallmarks of personal worth were publicly demonstrated and not easily disguised. The qualities respectability venerated, however, clashed directly with those honor’s code upheld. Piety, thrift, diligence, candor, propriety, temperance, and other like virtues were not fit topics of discussion among men of honor. Indeed, a too-close inquiry might be positively dangerous. For respectable men, these were clues, foundations of character which a man might strive to cultivate or ignore at his peril.59 They were peculiarly reflexive, not relational qualities by which he would be measured and held responsible.

The achievement of the honorable man was always gauged with an eye toward what had been: reputation flowed from the past, real or imagined, to the present, and was fixed by an imprecise equation of the two. But that was the attitude of a snob, respectable men held, one

“who meanly admires mean things,” transferring merit from a dubious source to an undeserving object. In the culture of respectability, attention was directed toward the future. “You must scorn delights,” Simms warned southern youth, “you must live laborious days. You are not to think of pleasure, or wealth, or even fame, except as the humblest incidents and tributaries in the prosecution of duty. This duty is life, and life is self-development.”60 What a man was today

58 On the emergence of respectability as a cultural imperative, see Stuart M. Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760-1900 (Cambridge, 1989), esp. 108-191; John F. Kasson, Rudeness and Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-Century Urban America (New York, 1990), 112-214; Richard O. Curry and Karl E. Valois, “The Emergence of an Individual Ethos in American Society, in American Chameleon: Individualism in Trans-National Context, ed. Richard O. Curry and Lawrence B. Goodheart (Kent, Oh., 1991), 20- 43; Mary Chapman and Glenn Hendler eds., Sentimental Men: Masculinity and the Politics of Affect in American Culture (Berkeley, 1999); C. Dallett Hemphill, Bowing to Necessities: A History of Manners in America, 1620- 1860 (New York, 1999), 129-213; Brian Luskey, On the Make: Striving Clerks, Counter Jumpers, and the Quest for Capital in Nineteenth-Century America (New York, 2010).

59 On the rise of this sort of social reading see especially Carlo Ginzburg, “Clues: Morelli, Freud, and Sherlock Holmes,” in The Sign of Three: Dupin, Holmes, Pierce (Bloomington, 1983), 81-118.

60 Simms, Self-Development, 42. Note that though Simms here speaks of duty—as other advocates of respectability frequently did—he does not describe it as honor’s votaries commonly did, as deriving from the past and describing socially generated expectations. 15 was the surest sign of what he might be tomorrow. It was this individual journey of self- development and its destination which counted. Not that a man might not suddenly change course: the whole evangelical and reform movement of the age was based on just such an allowance. But there were definite paths to be followed with progressive steps of reward or punishment. All began innocent in the cradle, but while some climbed up to a home in heaven, others descended through sin to a place in hell. It was simply a matter of will, as the career of

David Hines proved in spades.

Central to the power of this ideology was the way it discounted the fitness and permanence of honor’s elite. High birth or property offered no advantage in the quest for respectability, advice manuals promised: “the man of iron will may safely pursue his way to success and competence.”61 “We may still keep alive the artificial distinctions of birth and ancestry,” Columbia lawyer David McCord allowed,

but let us give to that man of humble condition the opportunity to cultivate his mind. . . and he will soon turn into withering contempt and ridicule our secret and select assemblies; he will soon and easily level to the earth our threatening barricades, even were they of the height and dimensions of the Chinese Wall, and he will march directly and boldly into the very citadel of society, and share its pleasures, its counsels and its honors, in common with the proudest and most wealthy in the land.62

“Riches and rank have no necessary connexion with genuine gentlemanly qualities,” British exhorter Samuel Smiles agreed. “The poor man may be a true gentleman—in spirit and in daily life. He may be honest, truthful, upright, polite, temperate, courageous, self-respecting, self- helping—that is, be a true gentleman.”63 By that standard, the closed circle of elite clubs like

Charleston’s St. Cecilia Society was as likely to be ill-bred as over-bred. Respectability

61 Address to Mechanics on Temperance (Nashville, 1855), 7.

62 [David J. McCord], “Popular Education,” Southern Literary Journal and Monthly Magazine, 1 (1835): 185-186.

63 Smiles quoted in Perkin, Origins of Modern English Society, 278. 16 announced a superior pedigree.64 So did “the man with the hundred names.”65

Across the Victorian era, a flood of books, articles, lectures, and sermons cascaded down on Anglo-Americans, declaring the importance and particulars of being respectable. Anyone might put on a show of one or another of the manly virtues, but few were fooled. “No man can be properly called virtuous who is not habitually so,” the Presbyterian divine James Henley

Thornwell explained. The respectable man demonstrated integrity of character, in the most theatrical sense: the personological aspects of the role he performed hung together seamlessly.

Considered as a map or stage, his position in the terrain of virtue and vice could be plotted precisely. Nothing could have been more discomfiting to honor’s champions.66

Fear of social subversion in all its forms—snobbery, hypocrisy, denial of merit—drove respectability forward, and with it the ideal of the self-made man. In contrast to the man of action honor paraded, self-made men were notable especially as bearers of character, not doers of deeds. They were, by no accident, remarkably staid and retiring fellows—quite unlike the good

Doctor. Passivity gave the purest proof of self-control. The problem, as literary historian Nina

Auerbach explains, was that as Victorians sought to realize their “best selves,” their efforts too often trailed off into performance, trapping the self behind a mask. “To do, is to act,” Auerbach

64 Don Doyle has discussed the power of the St. Cecilia Society in post-bellum Charleston, but this seems on a variant of the snobbery Thackeray needled. In pursuit of respectability in antebellum Charleston—and so, virtually all of the South—membership in any number of fraternal and voluntary associations was probably equally efficacious. Don H. Doyle, New Men, New Cities, New South: Atlanta, Nashville, Charleston, Mobile, 1860-1910 (Chapel Hill, 1990), 240-244.

65 Charleston Mercury, June 14, 1859.

66 Thackeray, Book of Snobs, 12; “Novels,” undated manuscript, James Henley Thornwell Papers, SCL; E. P. Rogers, Earnest Words to Young Men, in a Series of Discourses (Charleston, 1851). This prescriptive literature probably had a greater influence on southerners than historians have recognized. Among the most influential works, see William A. Alcott, The Young Man’s Guide (Boston, 1843); Henry W. Beecher, Lectures to Young Men on Various Important Subjects (Boston, 1846); Samuel H. Dickson, Essays on Life, Sleep, Pain, Etc. (Philadelphia, 1851); Nehemiah Adams, Man’s Place in the Universe: A Sermon Delivered at the Installation of the Rev. Thomas Osborne Rice as Pastor of the Independent or Congregational (Circular) Church, Charleston, S. C., April 1, 1860 (Charleston, 1860).

17 quotes Melville; “so all doers are actors.”67 Dave could not have said it better himself.

The suspicion that equation aroused struck to the core of honor’s ethos. Theatricality was the stock-in-trade of the swindler, the false-hearted harlot, the counterfeit gentleman.68 Who was safe when fakery invaded the public realm, the “calculating selfishness of the demagogue,” and the “charlatancy of political empirics” masquerading as statesmanship?69 Lurking fears that ordinary men and women might slide into the same devices—or, worse, that they enacted multiple selves in the routine of daily life—were too troubling to contemplate for long. But how could identity escape from behind the mask? “It is scarcely possible to be ourselves without acting ourselves,” Auerbach admits, “but to be sincere we must not act.”70

Or, more precisely, Victorians could not be seen as acting. Either the observer’s gaze had to be outrun—by fragmenting the world into various “spheres,” for example—or the division between actor and audience transcended.71 In nineteenth-century theatre, this imperative led to the triumph of melodrama, a mode of performance rooted in a “complex but infallibly readable system of coded gestures.”72 As in the grammar of cultural analysis Martin Meisel has called

“realisation,” the meaning of action here was revealed by connecting clues. The first step in this

67 Auerbach, Private Theatricals, 4; Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (New York, 1989), 41. No one better proved the power of passivity, of course, than Melville’s most famous clerk. “Bartleby the Scrivener, A Story of Wall Street,” Putnam’s Magazine, 2 (1853): 546-550, 609-616.

68 Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women; James W. Cook, The Arts of Deception: Playing with Fraud in the Age of Barnum (Cambridge, 2001); Stephen Mihm, A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States (Cambridge, 2007).

69 William C. Moragne, An Address on the Character of the Scholar and the Gentleman, Delivered before the Young Men of the Presbyterian High Schools at Greenwood, Abbeville District, at the Close of the Examinations, Juy 28, 1853 (Anderson, S. C., 1853), 3.

70 Auerbach, Private Theatricals , 4.

71 See Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, 1984), 91-110, 115-130, and the rather more lucid discussion in Kasson, Rudeness and Civility, 112-181.

72 Auerbach, Private Theatricals, 32-34. 18 comforting decoding was the delimitation of a performance space—a market, a political rally, a parlor, a parade—and the common affirmation that within this liminal sphere actors were not merely acting. In Victorian society, as stages of action multiplied, the willing suspension of disbelief became a precondition, yielded uneasily and sometimes faithlessly, of daily life under respectability’s regime. Men and women came—or claimed--to have confidence in one another.73

Respectability was portrayed visually in melodramatic style: through one’s features, clothing, manners, and gait, through one’s household, possessions, and associates, through geographic situation, a careful balance between self-assertion and self-control. Shiny sleeves, reddened eyes, a choleric temper, forward manners, an impulsive streak: each offered warnings that a man fell short in one way or another. Yet it was dangerous to judge too hastily. A fellow might be down-at-the-heels, but with diligence, honesty, good companions, and patience he would surely rise. The Charleston furniture dealer E. R. Cowperthwait had only a small capital, credit reporters noted in 1848, yet he was “hon[est], Indus[trious] & saving,” well on the way to becoming a “Snug man” with a “fair bus[iness].”74 “When you see a young man diligent in his calling, industrious in all his habits, and assiduously devoting himself to business,” E. P. Rogers explained, “you at once have confidence in his character.”75 The French summed it up in the phrase comme il faut: a respectable man did respectable things in respectable places among respectable people. The link with—and threat to—honor’s shape-shifting code became explicit in that truism.

73 Martin Meisel, Realisations: Narrative, Pictorial, and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth-Century England (Princeton, 1983), esp. 29-57.

74 Credit Ledgers, South Carolina, VI: 79, R. G. Dun and Company Collection, Baker Library, Graduate School of Business Administration, Harvard University [hereinafter cited as Baker, HU].

75 Rogers, Earnest Words to Young Men, 274. 19

There were any number of ways for honorable or respectable men to demonstrate worthiness, but the conflict between these perspectives and its social implications are best understood by focusing on the central tendency of each. The man of honor did his duty. The respectable man met his obligations. How vast the gulf between those imperatives: duty was an amorphous quality, socially defined, obligation a precise quantity, contractually delimited, calculated finally in dollars and cents. The honorable man gained reputation. The respectable man gained credit.76 “[T]he whole composition of our society is arithmetical,” one contemporary noted, “each gentleman ranking according to the numerical index of his property.”77 That new math filled honor’s votaries with horror.78

There was, to begin with, an astonishing apathy toward history among respectable men.

Neither the pedigree of blood and kin honorable men based their claims of social worth upon, nor the often bloody origins of the wealth upon which respectability raised its mudsill attracted much interest.79 Whether by hard work, sharp trading, sleight of hand, or simple violence, respectable men had acquired the sine qua non which embodied power and identity both. And by that standard, the honorable man—worth a lick—might not yet be worth a loan. Among respectable men, Charleston lawyer Isaac Hayne warned, “MONEY, with its attendant rank and

76 On creditworthiness as the core value of respectability, see (Philadelphia) Mechanics’ Free Press, October 2, 1830; Boston Investigator, December 18, 1839, February 14, 1844, October 22, 1845; (Columbia) South-Carolina Temperance Advocate, February 13, 1840; (Columbus) Daily Ohio Statesman, January 8, 1841, January 28, 1850; Pensacola Gazette, April 2, 1842; (Jonesborough, Tenn.) Jonesborough Whig, April 20, 1842, January 11, 1843; Boston Courier, June 13, 1842; (Montpelier) Vermont Watchman and State Journal, June 4, 1846; (Salt Lake City) Deseret News, August 10, 1854; (Fayetteville, N. C.) Fayetteville Observer, 1858. Cf., Craig Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (New York, 1998); Bruce H. Mann, Republic of Debtors: Bankruptcy in the Age of American Independence (Cambridge, 2002); Wendy A. Woloson, In Hock: Pawning in America from Independence through the Great Depression (Chicago, 2010).

77 Francis J. Grund, Aristocracy in America: From the Sketch-Book of a German Nobleman (New York, 1959), 84.

78See, e. g., Robert F. W. Allston to Adele P. Allston, April 24, 1858, Robert Francis Withers Allston Papers, SCL.

79 The classic statement of this point, of course, is Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, 3 vols. (Moscow, 1977), 667-724. 20 influence, is… openly proclaimed to be all in all, and VIRTUE ridiculed as the dream of the enthusiast, or the catch word of the knave.”80 Across the 1840s and ’50s, conservative southerners sneered at the emerging power of capital, damning its zero-sum ruthlessness and rejecting its sweeping, snooping redefinition of value.81 Though respectable folk ranked peers according to their desserts—for safety’s sake, if no other reason—the true apostles of this rising regime were the professional credit agencies and life insurance companies which sprang up in these years, transferring calculation of property values to the estimation of human worth. Its chief historians were the army of clerks, bookkeepers, and accountants who recorded the measure of respectability to be accorded each man, be they of the “deserving” poor or the merchant “as sound as a dollar.” Respectability went hand-in-hand with possessive individualism and all the social alienation which came in its train.82 Zalmon “Wildman will never set an ocean on fire,” went one typical valuation, “but will always pay his debts pro[mptly].”83 That made the Charleston hatter “good” in the most meaningful sense. In

America, Alexis de Tocqueville affirmed, “the first of all distinctions is money.”84 No maxim better summed up the central tenet of emerging bourgeois society, or measured the tide turning against honor’s order in the Old South.

A host of hoaxers, real, fictional, and somewhere in between had made that political point by 1860, skewering respectability and exploding honor’s ethos at the same time. Herman

80 Isaac W. Hayne, Anniversary Address, on the Formation of Individual Character, and Causes which Influence It; Delivered before the Erosophic Society of the University of Alabama, December 12, 1840 (Columbia, 1841), 12.

81 William J. Grayson, The Hireling and the Slave, Chicora, and Other Poems (Charleston, 1856); Porcher, “The Conflict of Capital and Labour,” Russell’s Magazine, 3 (1858): 289-298.

82 Compare the complaints of Porcher, Grayson, and their circle with Karl Marx, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (New York, 1964), 106-127, 137-167.

83 Credit Ledgers, South Carolina, VI: 34, R. G. Dun and Company Collection, Baker, HU.

84 Stow Persons, The Decline of American Gentility (New York, 1973), 20. 21

Melville’s shocking novel, The Confidence Man (1857) only culminated those efforts, which extended back through Barnum at least to the character of Jeremy Diddler, and European imposters before him.85 Unable to change a world that shut them out or drew their contempt, these “escapologists” changed themselves to appear to fit the categories which seemed most meritorious. Some few had higher motives—performing false identities for the benefit of others.

Most adopted imposture for the same selfish, lazy reasons moderns embrace lifestyles rather than building lives.86 But the most dangerous of all, perhaps, was Dave.

How could one man be in so many places, in so many guises, causing so much trouble?

And to what end? Dave’s story becomes neurotic, maniacal, fiendish, until we take him on his own terms, trusting his claim that he saw himself, in some sense, as a crusader, challenging social evil and establishing his own true identity. That act of confidence seems perilous, even at this distance, yet essential to understanding why southerners and Americans came to see him as powerful and important. Certainly he got lost along the way, but there was method in his madness, a pattern men like Fred Porcher instantly discerned and feared. For Doctor Hines saw things clearer than most respectable men liked to, and nearly any honorable men dared. His career pointed out precisely, again and again, just how hopelessly flawed southern society truly was, and where its contradictions must inevitably lead.

Was it any accident that David Hines became Dorsett Hamilton, or his supposed-kinsman

James? Jim Dandy had fallen from the pinnacle of southern honor himself in the 1830s and ’40s, piling up stacks of unpaid bills, dragging his friends’ names through the mud, and ultimately

85 The character of Jeremy Diddler derives from Briton James Kenney’s 1803 farce, “Raising the Wind,” but there is no evidence that Americans understood “diddling” as swindling before Edgar Allen Poe’s essay, “Diddling Considered as One of the Exact Sciences,” published in 1843. Burton R. Pollin, “Poe’s ‘Diddling’: The Source of Title and Tale,” Southern Literary Journal, 2 (1969): esp. 110. Although scholars note multiple sources for Poe’s satire, they have overlooked the obvious link to David Hines. Terence Whalen, “Poe’s ‘Diddling’ and the Depression: Notes on the Sources of Swindling,” Studies in American Fiction, 23 (1995): 195-201.

86 Sarah Burton, Imposters: Six Kinds of Liar (New York, 2000), esp. 2-5. 22 perishing (quite gallantly) on a foolish mission to rescue his ruined fortunes by peddling dubious

Texan bonds.87 Yet through all the years of decline, no southerner dared speak a word against that soul of chivalry, much less haul him to court--quite unlike poor Dave. The proud Hamptons in the 1850s were a half million dollars in debt, at wit’s end, and begging British middlemen for mercy, yet they remained heroes and kingmakers publicly.88 More than this, their slaves were notoriously mistreated.89 Privately, Fred Porcher berated himself as “a bad judge of men’s characters… a bad manager of money… a bad planter, a bad master, a bad manager,” hoodwinked by overseers and slaves alike, “faithless” to the task of manhood he faced—a total flop.90 There were thousands like him. Every month at every courthouse, especially in chivalrous South Carolina, slaves clustered around a bellowing sheriff, waiting to be sold off from some humiliated fellow who had proven unable to meet old obligations to some new, preening fellow eager to create new ones.91 By the 1850s, suits for debt across the state and further afield had blown sky high.92

Politically, too, hypocrisy reigned. John C. Calhoun was perennially penniless and, at the local level, anything but the titan of republican virtue history made him out to be; still, his

87 A pallid and uninquisitive biography of Hamilton is Robert Tinkler, James Hamilton of South Carolina (Baton Rouge, 2004). For a much better preliminary view, see William W. Freehling, Prelude to Civil War: The Nullification Controversy in South Carolina, 1816-1836 (New York, 1966), esp. 149-152.

88 George McDuffie to Nicholas Biddle, August 20, 1833, May 5, 1834, George McDuffie Papers, SCL; Entry of May 3, 1846, “Diary of a Visit to Columbia, S. C.,” Anonymous Papers, SCL.

89 James Stuart, Three Years in North America, 2 vols. (New York, 1833), 2: 71.

90 Samuel G. Stoney, ed., “Memoirs of Frederick Augustus Porcher,” South Carolina Historical Magazine, 47 (1946): 83.

91 Thomas D. Russell, “Slave Auctions on the Courthouse Steps: Court Sales of Slaves in Antebellum South Carolina,” in Slavery and the Law, ed. Paul Finkelman (Madison, 1997): 329-364.

92 I explore this problem in “Agriculture and the Coming of the Civil War in South Carolina,” Agricultural History Society meeting, Springfield, IL, June 2011. 23 leadership went unquestioned.93 Though he railed against “spoilsmen” who infected statesmanship, his political longevity owed precisely to his ability to reward allies and punish enemies in material terms.94 In spite of all their protestations of disinterest in political office, it was just those men who protested loudest who got elected most often—thanks, in no little part to the barbecue and booze their friends ladled out, or the dollars and favors they waved around.95

And what of the fire-eating leaders of the South who struggled for Calhoun’s mantle after

1850—mostly Carolinians, once again, like Dave himself—the Wigfalls, Yanceys, Keitts, and

Yulees, angry, unreasonable men so unlike the models of political virtue they claimed to admire?

Or the moderates like Preston Brooks they drew on to disaster? Or local politicos and editors who doubled down on vitriol because that won votes and sold papers?

Should we be surprised, then, that on the eve of secession, the planter elite embraced a craze for staging medieval jousting tournaments, dressing up as the Knight of This and the Lord of That, and performing their parts sincerely?96 Or that South Carolina steadfastly refused to grant a divorce to anyone under any conditions? Or that a fear of itinerant peddlers, foreign tradesmen and mechanics, or northern-born travelers and commercial men suffused the South?

Or that honorable men blasted each other to kingdom come on the dueling ground at an increasingly rapid rate, especially in chivalrous South Carolina? At a time when vast estates like

“Kensington” stood alongside “Poverty Hall,” when grass widows, philandering galore,

93 “Calhounery” was a regional synonym for political corruption throughout the late antebellum era. Robert Hendrickson, ed., The Facts on File Dictionary of American Regionalisms (New York, 2000), 35.

94 William W. Freehling, “Spoilsmen and Interests in the Thought and Career of John C. Calhoun,” Journal of American History, 52 (1965): 25-42.

95 Kenneth S. Greenberg, Masters and Statesmen: The Political Culture of American Slavery (Baltimore, 1985), 3- 22.

96 Lawrence T. McDonnell, “Elizabethan Dreams, Victorian Nightmares: Antebellum South Carolina’s Future through an English Looking Glass,” in The U. S. South and Europe: Transatlantic Relations in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, ed. Cornelis A. van Minnen and Manfred Berg (Lexington, 2013). 24 laudanum addiction, and “mulatto” babies multiplied, when honorable men could not tell the difference between a gentleman in their midst and a raving abolitionist like James Redpath when he walked into their drawing rooms, imagine the gall it must have taken—or the strict class allegiance—to call David T. Hines an imposter.97

We might multiply these contradictions ad infinitum: such was the nature of the Old

South, and the source of the political division which brought it to grief in 1860. But consider simply the passing of the great southern financier-industrialist Ker Boyce in 1854, the same year some mistakenly thought Dave had met his maker. Born in 1787 to a struggling farm family in

Newberry District, South Carolina, Boyce had little education and less hope of inheriting a viable patch of land. Instead, he wangled a clerkship in a local store and lucrative minor political posts as deputy sheriff and tax collector. Such chances suited the gregarious grasper well. By 1817 he had traveled the new State Road to Charleston, opening a store on upper King Street. Loud, drawling, and amiably down-home, Boyce was a surefire success in haggling with rednecks come to the big city. Respectability among Charleston’s commercial elite was less easily won, but by teaming up with George Henry, the uncouth trader gained a capable and pliant partner for the factorage business. Doors opened, and their fortunes flourished. In 1825 Boyce and Henry shifted operations to East Bay Street, as river transport crushed the wagon trade. From this citadel, Boyce--still the “cur of Newberry” to Charleston’s upper crust--embarked on a course spanning thirty years which made him one of the state’s wealthiest men, and perhaps the most powerful.98

Boyce and Henry’s operations expanded steadily, purchasing and extending a major East

97 James Redpath, The Roving Editor; or, Talks with Slaves in the Southern States (New York, 1859), 50.

98 Walter J. Fraser, Charleston! Charleston! The History of a Southern City (Columbia, 1989), 221; E. M. Starr to Zalmon Wildman, March 16, 1825, Zalmon Wildman Papers, SCL. 25

Bay wharf in 1836 and transforming Hayne Street into the center of the city’s jobbing trade. By that time, Boyce was trumpeting railroad development in the state and investing in cotton factories along the fall line. In 1830 he ran for the General Assembly on the nullifiers’ ticket, losing narrowly. Two years later he tried again, winning and holding his seat until 1839. That year he entered a bitter race for the state Senate, squeaking out victory under charges of corruption. Votes had been bought, campaigners threatened. When the Senate launched an investigation, though, Boyce short-circuited its role, resigning, running again, and winning in a landslide. He served eight years in the upper chamber, shaping legislation, making governors and federal senators, offering warm, misspelled words of advice to John C. Calhoun himself.99

“[A]s rough as a bear in manners and ignorant as a man can decently be,” no one was likely to confuse Boyce with Cicero.100 Pure “Hunker,” his power was rooted in the control of capital and, through it, men.101 From 1819 to 1822, Boyce dispensed favors as director of the

Bank of the State of South Carolina, and from 1826 to 1835, as director of the Charleston branch of the Bank of the United States. He played a key role in creating the Bank of Charleston in

1834 and guiding it thereafter, serving as president from 1840 to 1842. Throughout his political career, both in office and behind the scenes, the merchant’s motto was quid pro quo. Boyce ascended steadily, even eyeing the governorship, thanks to the support of his friends. Said friends in turn were well compensated. Henry became city warden in 1836, probably the limit of

99 The Papers of John C. Calhoun, 28 vols., ed. Robert L. Meriwether, Clyde N. Wilson, et al. (Columbia, 1959- 2003), 16: 501, 552-553, 620-621, 637, 659; 17: 152-153, 811-812; 20: 382-383, 535-536, 626-627; 21: 585-586; 22: 577-578; 23: 117-118; 24: 61; 25: 258; 26: 73-74.

100 Secret and Sacred: The Diaries of James Henry Hammond, a Southern Slaveholder, ed. Carol Bleser (New York, 1988), 82.

101 Eugene Sue, Jr. [pseud.] The Mysteries of Charleston: A Brief View of Matters and Things in General, the Internal Arrangements and Progressive Improvements, Past, Present, and Future, in the Great Metropolis of Charleston, With a Peep into the Various Ramifications of Society in its Several Aspects, Moral, Social, Political, and Financial (Charleston, 1846). The term derived both from the dug-in conservatism of Boyce’s group and their peddling propensities.

26 his ambition. James Hamilton became governor and state senator and soaked up a seemingly endless line of credit in star-crossed speculations. Young William Aiken, master to hundreds of slaves and lord of a bountiful plantation through the untimely death of his father, put his trust in

Boyce’s aid. Even Calhoun endured his meddling because the Machiavellian storekeeper had extended crucial loans to the senator and his kin.102 He was self-interested, to be sure, but a patriotic son of South Carolina nonetheless, a model for young clerks and shopkeepers equally anxious to rise.103

He was also, it turned out, a monumental fraud. At Boyce’s death, Charleston mourned the loss of one “whose heart throbbed for the promotion of every industrial enterprise in the

State.” Surely none had done more to promote the material well-being of his community. Then the truth came out. All along, it emerged, Boyce’s heart had pounded after profit, regardless of its source. Though Boyce had purchased railroad and factory stock in South Carolina, his will showed that “three-fourths of a million of his capital [wa]s invested in New York, and large sums in the far west.”104 Far from fattening South Carolina’s purse, the king of Hayne Street had been hand-in-glove with the Yankees, siphoning off precious capital for private gain. This was a humbug worthy of Barnum or Hines, and one self-doubting South Carolina did not soon forget.

As they gazed on the shopkeepers of King Street and Broad, the jobbers and wholesalers of

Hayne and East Bay, few could but consider the wayward loyalties of merchant capital and the uncertain politics of those who bought cheap and sold dear.105

102 Ernest M. Lander, The Calhoun Family and Thomas Green Clemson: the Decline of Southern Patriarchy (Columbia, 1983), 101, 107.

103 Boyce typifies the contradictions so well described in Luskey, On the Make.

104 William Gregg, “Practical Results of Southern Manufactures,” De Bow’s Review, 18 (1855): 791.

105 Such fears of Charleston’s merchant class were of long standing. See, e. g., Defence of the Shopkeepers of South- Carolina, and Particularly of the Grocers, Against the Late Law ‘For the Better Regulation of Slaves and Free 27

Just six years later, mind you, it was just these men in just this place who howled first and loudest for secession and finally got what they said they wanted. And we, poor fools, are humbugged by their performance, imagining that they were sincere, united, and truly aiming toward the thing they ultimately hit. One would suppose that the story of Dave—or just about any other instance of historical causation—would urge caution, to say the least. But as Doctor

Hines proved, again and again, men and women will see what they want to see, and bamboozle themselves into believing it. We need to look closer, deeper, more carefully into the history of

Dave and the Old South both if we mean to understand that crisis.

As to David Hines, it should surprise no anyone that he did not get caught up in the higher nonsense of disunion and civil war. On the eve of secession, “the venerable gentleman” still “maintain[ed] his respectability and dignity,” roaming the region as the purported “traveling correspondent of a newspaper in South Carolina,” landing in various jail cells, and merrily scamming the unwary.106 After three decades, it is fair to say, he knew no other life than to keep running, and it did help to keep supper on his plate, whether by scamming or serving time. As it happened, in 1860 he ran straight into a Tennessee prison on a three year term for swindling, once again.107 The dream of somehow winning honor and wealth surely died hard, as it does for most men. But, immortal as Doctor Hines was, he probably saw that death only dimly, as it disappeared far behind, twirling in a cloud of dust as he sped on toward his next destination and better times. Half-crushed and still twitching, perhaps the poor, wild thing might still live somehow, and he with it. Any idiot knew better. This was a world of winners and losers.

Persons of Colour,’ in a Series of Letters, as Originally Published in the Charleston Mercury, with Additional Remarks (Charleston, 1835).

106 Charleston Mercury, January 28, 1859; Charleston Daily Courier, June 14, 1859.

107 New York Herald, April 9, 1860. 28

Dave’s time was running out.

In 1863, he got out of jail in Memphis, and went on the grift once more. Shortly after he was released by a Confederate court for crossing illicitly between the lines of Blue and Gray—he had strayed through liminal territory all his life—a teenager with a shotgun emptied both barrels into Dave down in St. Stephen’s Parish in January, 1865, for reasons still unclear.108 The newspapers said that Doctor Hines died “almost immediately.”109 The story sounds implausible: how did one as clever as he so misread the clues that led to his impending doom? But we might say the same about the Old South as well. Imposters, sooner or later, are all found out.

108 Memphis Daily Appeal, May 5, 1863; (Savannah) Daily Morning News, May 23, 1863; (Natchez, Miss.) Natchez Daily Courier, June 25, 1863.

109 (Columbia) Daily South Carolinian, January 24, 1865. 29